War and Remembrance Page 15

  It had only one military advantage to balance its feeble sluggishness — surprise; and it had blown its surprise. Now it was a creeping scorpion in a flashlight beam. Its only resort was to dive; the deeper it dove, the less the chance of being found and pinned by sound echoes. But in Lingayen that refuge was denied. The test depth of a fleet submarine, then a guarded secret, was four hundred twenty feet, and the safety margin was close to a hundred percent. In extremis the submarine captain could as a rule burrow down as far as six hundred feet, with some hope that his poor tube might survive the leaks springing at the fittings. Deeper, the heavy black fist of the sea would crumple the steel hull like tinfoil. Hoban would gladly have risked the Devilfish beyond test depth now; but the end of the line for him in most of Lingayen was shallow muck at about a hundred feet.

  There were other hazards. A surface ship had a natural balance, but a submerged submarine was a waterlogged object. Trapped air bubbles in its tanks held it suspended, a wobbly thing hard to control. Water and fuel oil, pumped here and there through pipe mazes, made the long tube tilt one way or another, and the submarine unfolded planes much like an aircraft’s to steady it. But the vessel had to keep moving or the planes would not work.

  Stopped for long, a submarine like the Devilfish was done for. It would slowly sink below its test depth — or in this case, into the muck — or it would pop to the surface to face the destroyer’s five-inch guns. And it could not keep moving underwater for more than a few hours, at any speed. For underwater there is no air for a combustion engine to consume. As it had only so much bottled air for its crew to breathe in a dive, so it had only so much stored power to use. Then it had to stop, lie on the bottom, or come up for air to burn fuel and get itself going again.

  On the surface, the submarine wound itself up for moving underwater. The diesels not only drove the boat but also charged two huge banks of batteries with energy to their chemical brim. Submerged, the Devilfish would draw on these batteries. The faster it moved underwater, the quicker the batteries would go flat. At three or four knots it could stay down for about twenty-four hours. Doing radical escape maneuvers at ten knots, it would be finished in an hour or so. In extreme hazard, the captain could try to outwait his pursuer, lying on the bottom while the crew used up its air. That was the final limit: forty-eight to seventy-two hours of lying doggo, and a submarine had to choose between asphyxiation below and destroyer guns above.

  The lights flickered yellowly on. Byron wiped the salt water off his face — from some fitting strained by the explosion but holding, thank God! The chief pushed himself off Byron, his mouth forming apologetic words the ensign was too deafened to hear. However, as through cotton wool he did hear Aster directly overhead bawling, “Captain, he’s got our depth cranked in. We’re getting creamed. Why don’t we go to fifty feet and give him a knuckle?”

  The captain’s voice blared in the tube, “Briny, come up to fifty feet! Fifty feet! Acknowledge!”

  “Fifty feet! Aye aye, sir!”

  The planesmen steadied the vessel to climb. Their response was calm and expert, though both of them looked over their shoulders at Byron with round eyes in livid faces. As it climbed through the depth charge turbulence, the Devilfish made a sharp turn to create the “knuckle,” more turbulence to baffle the echo-ranging. The sailors clung to anything handy. Locking an elbow on the ladder, Byron noted on the depth gauges that the power plant must still be working, for at this angle and rate of climb they were making ten knots. Four more explosions shook the deck; hideous sounds, but farther off. This time nothing broke in the control room, though the sailors swayed and staggered, and particles of loose debris rattled in Byron’s face.

  “Levelling off at fifty feet, Captain!”

  “Very well. Everything okay down there?”

  “Seems to be, sir.” Derringer was yanking at the broken sparking cable. The other sailors, shakily cursing, were picking instruments and rubbish off the deck.

  Several more charges rumbled and grumbled below, each one duller and farther away. Then Byron’s heart jumped, as the pings of the Jap destroyer shifted to long scale: p-t-i-i-ng! pi-i-i-i-ng! In the Pearl Harbor drills that had been the moment of triumph, the hunter’s mournful wailing confession that he had lost the scent, and was forced back to routine search; and the down Doppler — the lowered pitch of the sound — betrayed that the destroyer had turned away from the Devilfish.

  A joy as intense as his previous fear, a wave of warm physical delight, swept over Byron. They had shaken loose, and he rode in a blooded submarine! The Devilfish had survived a depth charging! It had taken hard punishment, and it had eluded its pursuer. All the submarine action narratives he had ever read paled once for all into gray words. All the peacetime drills seemed child’s play. Nobody could describe a depth charging, you had to live through it. By comparison, the bombings he had experienced in Warsaw and Cavité had been mild scares. This was the real thing, the cold skull-grin of the Angel of Death, frightful enough to test any man at war. Such thoughts shot through Byron Henry’s mind with the joyous relief, when he heard the destroyer pinging again on long scale with down Doppler.

  Things became quieter. The plotting team gathered again around the dead reckoning tracer. Aster and Captain Hoban descended from the conning tower to watch the picture form. The plot soon coalesced into two course lines; the destroyer heading toward the beachhead at Lingayen, the Devilfish moving the opposite way.

  Aster said, grinning with relief, “I guess he figures we’d still try for the landing area.”

  “I don’t know what he’s figuring, but this is just great!” Hoban turned to Byron. “All right. Tour the compartments, Briny, and let me have a survey of the damage.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  “And talk to the crew. See how they’re doing. We got some crazy screaming about water in the after torpedo room. Maybe a valve came unseated for a minute, or something.”

  The captain spoke in collected tones, and seemed in every way himself, yet something about him was changed. Was it the vanished mustache? No, not that. It was the look of his eyes, Byron thought; they seemed bigger and brighter, yet dark-ringed as though with fatigue. Hoban’s brown eyes now dominated his face, alert, concerned, and shiny. The boss man had tasted his full responsibility. That would sober anybody. As Byron left the control room, Lady Aster, moistening the end of a Havana, gave him a contorted wink.

  Every compartment had some minor breakage or malfunction to report — dangling bunks, shattered lamp bulbs, overturned tables, jammed water lines — but under the pounding the Devilfish had proved remarkably resilient; that was the sum of what Byron saw. Nothing essential to operations was down. The crew was another matter. Their condition ranged from pallid shock to profane defiance, but the note all through the submarine was dispirited; not so much because of the depth charging, though there was much obscene comment on its terrors — and in one compartment a strong smell of befouled trousers — but because the torpedoes had missed. They had taken the beating for nothing. It was a sour outcome after all the E’s in drills. This crew was used to success. Some sailors ventured mutters to Byron about the captain’s hasty shot on slow setting.

  When Byron brought back his report to the wardroom, Aster and Hoban had their heads bent over a sketch for the battle account. The captain was diagramming his attack in orange ink for the enemy track, blue for the Devilfish, and red for the torpedoes. Hoban’s diagrams were always textbook models. “I saw those wakes, goddamn it, Lady,” he said wistfully, inking ruled lines. “Those new magnetic exploders are defective. I’m going to say so, by God, in the war diary and in the action report both. I don’t care if I hang for it. I know our range was long, but we had an excellent solution. The wakes went directly under the first and third ships. Those ships should have had their backs broken. The torpedoes never exploded.”

  “Better check in with plot before you take the watch,” Aster said casually to Byron. “We’re heading for the entrance.”<
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  “The entrance?”

  The captain’s dark-ringed eyes gleamed at the puzzled note. “Of course. The whole landing area is on submarine alert now, Briny. We can’t accomplish anything there. Up at the entrance we might find some fat pickings.”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  Over Hoban’s head, as he bent over the diagram, Aster grotesquely winked again. The implication was clear and jarring to Byron. The mission of the Devilfish, the only way it could now justify twenty years of maintenance and training, was to oppose the Japanese landing at the beachhead, no matter what the risk. They were being paid for extra-hazardous duty! Byron had assumed that, once out of the attack area, Hoban would unquestionably circle and make for the troop transports. This was the submarine’s moment, the reason it had been built and manned. Giving prudent arguments, Branch Hoban was abandoning the mission with an intact submarine, still loaded with twenty torpedoes.

  They had evaded but not shaken off the destroyer. Its long-scale pings still shivered sadly and faintly in the Devilsh’s sonar receiver.

  On Derringer’s plot the Japanese search plan soon became clear: a pattern of widening squares, much as in American antisubmarine doctrine. Off Pearl Harbor, in the peacetime exercises, a submarine that had gotten clear of its pursuer would send a sonar signal, and the destroyer would speed over for another attack run; the search phase being a tedious boring process that wasted time and fuel. But now the process was far from boring; it was the real thing, ugly, tense, and perilous. The searcher above intended to find and sink the Devilfish. His chances still were good.

  For though the scorpion was out of the flashlight beam now, and crawling away in the dark, there was no satisfactory place to hide. Hoban had heavily depleted his batteries. The pursuer, fresh from Japan with full oil bunkers, could steam at eight or ten times Hoban’s normal underwater speed. In another few hours the Devilfish would have a “flat can” — no battery juice left. Much now depended on brute luck. Hoban was making a beeline away from the point where the destroyer had lost him. That was doctrine, though Byron (and obviously Aster, too) thought he should not be heading for the entrance. The destroyer captain, having completed two tight squares, was heading out on a wider sweep. If he happened to choose the right turns, he might pick up the unseen crawler again. But the night sea was a gloomy tossing blank, the choices were infinite, and failure was discouraging. Also, he might be called off to other duty. These were the hopeful factors in the problem; except that “problem” was a peacetime word, somewhat too bland for the dogged pursuit by this anonymous menace.

  Standing watch in the conning tower, Byron heard the captain and the exec discuss tactics. The time of sunset had passed, and Aster wanted to surface. Running on the diesels, they could race out of the destroyer’s search pattern at flank speed, and charge up the can for more underwater action; perhaps for an attack on this very pursuer. Hoban roundly vetoed the idea. “Goddamn it, Lady, surface? How can we gamble on unknowns? What’s the weather like up there? Suppose it’s a calm crystal-clear night? We might be up-moon from him — ever think of that? A black tin duck in the moonlight! Even the periscope could show up in binoculars. How reliable are our sonar ranges? Plus or minus a mile, we figure, but with five-inch guns waiting for us up there, maybe we’d better make that two miles, hey? All right. Plot has him at what now — seven thousand?”

  “Seventy-five hundred and opening, sir, with strong down Doppler.”

  “All right. Even so! At three or four thousand yards a lookout can pick us up with binoculars. It’s all poppycock that Japs can’t see in the dark. If that destroyer spots us surfaced with a flat can, we’ve had the course. Now if we could open the range to twelve or fourteen thousand, surfacing might make some sense. In fact, that’s the thing to try for. Byron! Go to seven knots.”

  “Seven knots, sir?”

  “Are you deaf? Seven knots.”

  “Seven knots. Aye aye, sir.”

  The decision baffled Byron. Aster’s face went dead blank. At seven knots the Devilfish had little more than an hour of underwater propulsion left. Captain Hoban, in an attempt to be cautious, seemed to be invading the last margin of safety.

  Plot reported the Japanese destroyer making a turn; and after a short interval, another turn. Sonar announced, “Up Doppler.” The destroyer was now closing the Devilfish. The power-consuming time dragged on, while in the conning tower Aster and the captain speculated on the pursuer’s last action. Had the Jap picked up a stray sonar echo? Had he by bad luck gotten an echo from a school of fish, in the submarine’s direction? Should they change course? Hoban elected to bear on toward the entrance. The sonar range gradually dropped to seven thousand yards; twenty minutes later, to six thousand — three miles. If the night was dark or rainy, Byron thought, they still might surface and flee at twenty-one knots. Why didn’t the skipper at least chance a periscope glimpse of the weather? As the range dropped to four thousand, the option to surface was dimming. Sonar pings now began reverberating faintly through the hull itself. Byron’s remaining hope was that the destroyer would pass without picking up an echo; but this faded too, when he heard Derringer announce below, in a sepulchral voice, that the destroyer was turning to a collision course.

  Aster came scrambling up the ladder, eyes narrowed, dead gray cigar clenched in his teeth. “Battle stations, Briny.”

  “What now?”

  “Well, he’s found us, all right. The captain’s going to the bottom.”

  “Will that work?”

  “Depends.”

  “On what?”

  “For one thing, on how good his sonar is. Maybe he can’t screen out bottom return.”

  Byron remembered this tactic from submarine school exercises off New London. Echo-ranging on a vessel on the bottom was inexact; the random return diffused the readings. Hurrying down the ladder to his post as diving officer, he saw Captain Hoban staring at the plot, where the destroyer’s pencilled course was curving in, dot by dot, toward the white moving point of the Devilfish.

  “Flood negative! Retract sonar head!” Hoban plunged for the ladder, shouting up through the hatch. “Lady, give me a fathometer reading and pass the word for all hands to stand by to ground! Hard right rudder!”

  The submarine mushed downward, slowing and turning. Byron levelled off, well above fathometer depth. Shortly there came a jolt, another jolt, and the Devilfish settled, rocking and grinding, on the mud; according to the depth gauges, at the exact figure of the fathometer reading — eighty-seven feet.

  Silence, dead waiting silence, in the Devilfish; outside, loud long-scale pings, and the mutter of propellers. On the dead reckoning tracer, the destroyer track moved closer and closer to the halted point of light. The propeller noise intensified. Derringer was getting no sonar ranges now, the attacker was too close; he was projecting the destroyer’s track by using his ears and his judgment. As Byron’s breath all but failed him, the pencil line passed the point of light, and slowly moved away. A sharp fall of pitch of the long-scale pings to down Doppler confirmed Derringer’s guesswork plot. All the men in the control room heard it — the young sailors, the young officer, the old chief— and all looked around at each other with wan hope.

  How totally a submariner depended on the captain, Byron thought, how crucial was confidence in him! Though he had once hated Hoban, he had never until now doubted his skill; he had in fact resented his crushing superiority. Now the rat of panic was gnawing at Byron’s spirit. Was he in shaky or amateurish hands, after all, a hundred feet down in the sea in a long vulnerable metal tube, waiting for a ship on the surface to dynamite him to a vile death by drowning? Black seawater under terrible pressure gripped the thin hull; one opened seam, one blown valve, and his life would be choked out by flooding salt water. He would never again see Natalie, nor even once lay eyes on the baby he had fathered. He would rot on the floor of Lingayen Gulf, and fish would swim in and out of his bones.

  This awareness of being in peril under water, whic
h submariners suppress but never for a moment wholly forget, was clamping a cold hold on Byron Henry. Not forty-eight hours ago, just before reporting to the Mars-man building, he had been jolting down a Manila boulevard in hot sunshine, perched in the back of a truck on a crated mine, jocularly drinking beer with his working party. And now —

  Derringer said huskily, “Mr. Henry, I think he’s turning back.”

  The pinging outside shifted to short scale.

  Now fear stabbed Byron’s very bowels. This time the submarine was caught; caught dead on the bottom and almost out of power, and he was caught in it, and all this was no dream, dreamlike though the horror seemed. Death under the sea was now coming at him, screaming through the short-scale pings in malevolent rising glee, “Found you! Found you! Found you!”

  The faces in the control room took on one expression — stark terror. Chief Derringer was not looking at the plot, but staring vacantly upward, his heavy mouth wide open, his big fat face a Greek mask of fright; the man had five children and two grandchildren. The propellers came drumming and thrashing directly overhead once again — KER-DA-TRAMM! TRAMM! TRAMM! Morelli at the bow planes clutched his crucifix, crossed himself, and muttered a prayer.

  Click, click, click, like little pebbles or balls bouncing on the hull; it was the arming of the depth charges at their preset depth, though Byron did not know that this caused the noise. He too was praying; nothing complicated, just, “God, let me live. God, let me live.”

  11

  THE block leader’s yells and curses rouse the Russian prisoners at 4:30 A.M. from their uneasy dozing. It is the only sleep they can get, jammed three in a bunk in the cold and stench of the quarantine camp blockhouses, on straw pallets crawling with vermin. Getting down from his upper bunk for roll call, Berel Jastrow murmurs the obligatory Hear O Israel morning devotion. He should wash first, but that can’t be done, water is a hundred yards away and forbidden at this hour. He adds the Talmud’s brisk summary prayer for times of danger, and concludes, “Yehi ratzon she-ekhye — Let me live.” Next will come an hour or more of standing at attention in ranks, in the icy wind and darkness of the Polish midwinter, clad in a thin prison suit of striped ticking.